Sartre, Camus and Ken Bruen

Hey, I didn't say it; Declan Burke did, and he just might be on to something. Here's part of what he had to say about Bruen's character Jack Taylor in a recent interview with the Sons of Spade:

"In [Taylor’s] world, everyone is equally culpable, and Bruen has inverted the focus of his PI’s gaze so that it’s himself he’s investigating, his morality, the part that he plays in creating the kind of world where good, bad and indifferent all jostle for pre-eminence. What Bruen is doing for crime fiction right now is akin to what Camus and Sartre, in their different ways, did for philosophy sixty or seventy years ago – although a more appropriate, Irish, reference would be that of Samuel Beckett."

What I find interesting is that Burke's comments distance Jack Taylor from the ranks of middle-aged loner P.I.s, a group about which I have commented from time to time and to which I now realize that Taylor's resemblance may be merely superficial.

Paris, city of crime: The end. I arrived back in Philadelphia yesterday, a day ahead of my luggage. I can't tell you how good it is to be home from Paris and ready to go back to work. Actually, I could, but it would make unpleasant telling and dreary reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Declan Burke
Ken Bruen

The "lonely middle-aged detective" is growing old

I've come under withering attack for my comments about the loner detective. (OK, two readers registered mild dissent, but permit me my little fantasies, will you?)

One reader offered an incisive comment that I'll repeat here. It's from the Camilleri-loving Uriah Robinson at Crime Scraps, who calls the lonesome loner detectives a "sub-genre that has been done so well in the past that it has run its course."

It may have run its course, but it's enjoying an interesting after-life, sort of like the Roman Empire after the Germanic invasions.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

More about fictional detectives of a certain age (notes on genre)

A reader's critical remarks about my recent post Deadline in Athens, Part II prompted some thoughts about the nature of "genre" fiction.

The reader objected to my inclusion of Peter Temple's Jack Irish on a list of (mostly) middle-aged detectives with bad, sad or questionable marital histories and, in some cases, a tendency toward alcohol and self-pity (and, yes, Jack Irish is a detective, even though he might not list "detective" as his profession if asked to do so on a tax return. There is ample precedent for using the term even if the sleuth in question is not a police officer or professional investigator. T.J. Binyon's excellent history Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction includes amateurs of all kinds. For the purposes of my discussion, a detective was anyone engaged in trying to solve a crime or conduct an investigation. Detective seemed more serious and proper a word than sleuth.)

The reader's main objection, though, was to my having lumped Jack Irish in with other crime-fiction protagonists. Jack Irish, he wrote, "has more friends than is natural, and is one of the most interesting and complex characters in the genre." Further, he admonished me to read more Jack Irish novels "before you cram him into a pigeonhole."

He's right -- on the first point. With respect to the admonition, however, a pigeonhole is the last thing I tried to cram Jack Irish into. If anything, I pushed him onto a pedestal. Here is part of what I wrote in October about Bad Debts, the first Jack Irish novel:

"Yes, Jack Irish has lost his wife to a violent killer. Yes, he came close to personal and professional ruin because of it. But no, he does not sink into self-pity. More to the point, he is capable of clear-eyed self-analysis that no self-dramatizing American, self-pitying Scottish or self-conscious Swedish detective-novel protagonist would be able to manage."

Irish's low-key perspective, I wrote, "makes this something quite new in tone."

The larger issue, though, is genre. My light-hearted list included, in addition to Irish, Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander, Paco Ignacio Taibo II's Hector Belascoaran Shayne, Yasmina Khadra's Brahim Llob, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and a few others. That's an interesting and varied group of protagonists, and it is not "pigeonholing" to recognize that they are of a type. Authors themselves often recognize this in ways that are far too numerous to list here. They allude or refer specifically to earlier crime writers or detectives. Their scenes echo illustrious precedents in great detective fiction.

The link can be subtle, as in Brahim Llob's chilling account of how the fear and violence in Algiers have blunted his sexual desire for his wife in Yasmina Khadra's Morituri. Or it can be explicit and hilarious, as in Robert Crais' Stalking the Angel, where Elvis Cole welcomes a beautiful female client to his office, as so many previous fictional private investigators had, only Cole is standing on his head at the time.

Even if the author does not make the connection, the reader does. If someone writes a "mainstream" novel about a divorced, 45-year-old accountant who likes a drink from time to time and has a job to do, no one thinks anything of it. But substitute detective for accountant, and all kinds of associations come into play. The author may move against this type, may move with it, may ring changes on it, or may do all at the same time in a kind of counterpoint between writer, reader and genre, but the type is always there. Even in the face of something as unfamiliar as the eighteenth-century Judge Dee story translated by Robert van Gulik, most readers, maybe all, will invoke the more familiar fictional detectives, if only as examples of what Judge Dee is not. (Note: That book, published in English as Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, inspired Van Gulik to write his own series of Judge Dee novels.)

In any case, this story has a happy ending. I'd been thinking of reading more Jack Irish, and the thoughts that led me to write this comment also sent me to a nearby bookshop, where I bought Black Tide, the second Jack Irish novel. I've read the first chapter, and it's brilliant. But then, I expected no less when I paid tribute to Jack Irish by including him on my list of interesting and distinctive fictional detectives who happen to share certain demographic and social characteristics.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Peter Temple
Jack Irish

Deadline in Athens, Part II

How many countries have given the world disillusioned fictional male detectives with bad, sad or uncertain marital histories and quirkily solitary habits? Let me pose the question another way: How many countries are there in the U.N.?

Kurt Wallander from Sweden, John Rebus from Scotland, Franz Heineken and Jack Irish from Australia, Hector Belascoaran Shayne from Mexico, Pepe Carvalho from Spain, Inspector Espinosa from Brazil, Brahim Llob from Algeria and Sartaj Singh from India come to mind, along with a couple of Americans you may have heard of named Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

I’m sure that if Kosovo and New Caledonia attain independence one day, they, too, will eventually produce angst-ridden, divorced, alcohol-weakened fictional sleuths sickened by the senseless violence of Pristina and Nouméa. And if those sleuths are police officers, they will clash with their officious superiors as often as they clash with murderers, drug dealers and blackmailers.

Petros Markaris’ Costas Haritos, chief inspector of the Athens CID, is decidedly of the breed, though with slight differences. Twenty pages into Deadline in Athens, for example, he hasn’t taken a drink yet. He also may turn out to be a bit more arrogant than most, and I’ll be anxious to see if this figures in the plot or is merely an incidental aspect of his character.

Markaris offers some interesting observations about journalism in Greece -- no surprise, given the novel’s titles (it's called The Late-Night News in the U.K.). A flashy young reporter, he has Haritos tell us, is “A modern-day Robespierre with a camera and a microphone” who refuses to address Haritos by name: “He believed … that he represented the conscience of the people, and the conscience of the people treated everyone equally: no name or sign of respect, courtesies that only lead to distinctions between citizens.”

This interested me because it's American journalists who have traditionally taken themselves seriously and waxed somber about their responsibilities and principles, sometimes to the amusement of their British colleagues. (Haritos has a wonderful comeback for the reporter: “I ignored him and addressed myself to them all as a body. If he wanted equality, he’d have it.”)

Haritos also tells the reader something that ought to make any newspaper reader or employee nod in sad recognition: “Reporters are always on my back. … Once it was newspapermen and newspapers; now it’s reporters and cameras.”

Even at this early stage, Haritos shows signs of the idealism that lurks beneath the crusty surface of so many fictional detectives. He conforms to type in another way, as well. I alluded to the quirkily solitary habits of middle-aged fictional sleuths; Haritos’ habit may be weirder than most. He reads dictionaries for pleasure.

P.S. I would not want to create the impression that this interesting group of fictional detectives is nothing but a big bag of symptoms. Jack Irish and Franz Heinken, in particular, are low on angst. Must be the air in Australia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Petros Markaris
Crime fiction, Greece